Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (30 page)

As Betty Deran became absorbed in Gurdjieff studies, Alma turned toward the new feminism and joined a gay consciousness-raising group that included Kate Millett and Sydney Abbott. But I don’t think this is what finally broke her and Betty up. I had met them when I was trying monogamy after half a lifetime of promiscuity, and they were a rare, stable couple in the gay world of that time, but by now both Alma and my friend Neil were finding monogamy stifling. Alma told me when she escaped married life for the lesbian world she thought lesbians had had to fight so hard to be themselves they must be wonderful, caring people. She gave a rueful laugh over the reality she’d discovered, that lesbians were just as cruel and selfish as everyone else. But now she herself wanted to be out in that cruel world. In Alma’s case, actually it was her drinking as much as the constricting domestic bonds that ended the relationship with Betty. When she drank, the only way you could tell was that her talking became a monologue rather than a conversation.

Upon her separation with Betty, she got a job at Columbia University Press and moved into a ramshackle floor-through apartment in an old 19th century house on 19th Street that was always full of her lesbian/ feminist tribe. That is where her oldest daughter Natalie came to stay with her. It was extraordinary that her four daughters, whom she had deserted, like the heroine of Ibsen’s
The Doll’s House
, had been raised by their father and stepmother with no rancor against her for leaving them. As the daughters grew up, each sought her out in New York. Remarkably, they had come to understand her and her need to find her own way. I also stayed in the 19th Street apartment for a time, after Neil and I broke up, before going off to nurse my broken heart in Afghanistan.

This was after the Stonewall riot, and while I was away, I was especially pleased to hear that she carried a sign during a Gay Pride parade that read, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me,” the title of my first book. But her tastes in poetry were broad. Besides liking the poetry of May Swenson, she also could quote reams of poetry by May’s bête noire, May Sarton.

Early on in her new freedom, Alma tried another live-in lover, but it didn’t work. One of Alma’s complaints was that she lay in the bathtub with the hot water running, and Alma, with her depression childhood, kept worrying over the fuel being burned to produce the hot water. She had grown up in a big dirt-poor family in Traverse City, Michigan, with a policeman father and a mother who was a nurse and a Seventh Day Adventist.

Later, she moved into Westbeth, the artists’ housing project in the West Village, where I had also landed a studio, but Alma was too down-to-earth to live in a building of just “artists.” Even when she switched to a building on Perry Street, which was more congenial, being full of odd village types, she was never happy in an apartment. Her vision of life, instilled from her childhood in the Midwest, meant living in a house with rocking chairs and Afghan lap robes and copies of
Yankee Magazine
in the magazine rack. So when she got a well-paying job at
Time Magazine
, she bought an old wooden house with a porch in Poughkeepsie and settled in with a new partner, Julie Weber, with whom she spent the rest of her life. As it turned out, her old mate, Betty Deran, also moved to Poughkeepsie, so that bond continued as strongly as ever. By this time, Alma had joined AA and given up drinking, but needed Betty’s butchy encouragement, even discipline, to get on with her writing.

When, in 1993, Alma developed cancer and had a colostomy, she hated it. She had always been proud of her perfect bowel movements, and one of the joys of having a mate, she said, was to be able to call them into the bathroom and show them. The indignities of living with a colostomy bag forced her into unnatural isolation until she succeeded in getting the doctor to reverse the colostomy. But that victory did not last long and the cancer spread. She now refused to see anyone or submit to any further medical treatment. When she collapsed and the doctors held out no hope for recovery, she spent her last days at home under hospice care, surrounded by friends and her four daughters. On her deathbed, in and out of consciousness, she was in love with all her former lovers. Betty Deran she called “the light of my life.” And when another old lover flew in from San Francisco and took her hand, Alma came to and murmured, “Sweet cunt.”

Patience & Sarah
has remained in print in the US and numerous foreign-language editions – Norwegian, Japanese, French, and Italian among them – as well as being adapted for the stage in London. She published three more books with Naiad Press:
The Love of Good Women
(1986),
Side by Side
(1990), and
A Dooryard Full of Flowers
(1993). The day before her death, an opera based on
Patience &
Sarah
by Wende Persons and Paula Kimper was performed at Trinity Church in Manhattan.

She is survived by her companion, Julie Weber, and the four children of her early marriage: Natalie, Joyce, Charlotte, and Louise.

Zan Knudson, the late May Swenson’s partner, pronounced what I think is an appropriate epitaph. “Since May’s death,” she told me, “Alma is the only person to have died who May would want to be with her in heaven.”